Tuesday Two.Oh! A tool for Grading and Attendance

Tuesday Two.Oh! is not meant as an endorsement, but as an exploration of the tools that are out there. Click at your own risk.

Today on Tuesday Two.Oh! we’re going to talk about a tool to help teachers keep track of grades, attendance and assignments. Since I’ll be teaching a class this fall, this is especially interesting to me (though I’ll likely use build-in features in Blackboard). This may not be relevant to all librarians, but I thought it was an interesting tool that was worth taking a look at. So, without further ado, let’s take a look at Learn Boost.

From the site: “LearnBoost’s free all-in-one solution allows teachers to manage their classroom by offering an amazing gradebook, software for managing and creating lesson plans, tracking attendance, maintaining schedules, integrating Google Apps including calendars, tagging of Common Core Standards, and so much more.”

One of the things I instantly like about Learn Boost is their up-to-date blog. Often when I’m looking at 2.0 sites it seems like they were started and then the enthusiasm just sort of petered out. But a current blog shows continued investment- especially on the back end.

It was extremely easy to sign up for an Learn Boost account. You could either sign up with facebook connect or the old fashioned way.

Quick and painless. Once you sign up for the site you pretty much have a blank slate to work with.

I tried to click through the site a little and explore before I entered any information (1. because I don’t have any information, and 2. even if I did I wouldn’t post it here…), but you really need to input a class and students for the other aspects of Learn Boost to work.

So, I created a new class (one that my colleagues at UCO are currently teaching, and I will be teaching in the fall) called IME1102.

Obviously, it’s very easy to enter class information- and the same goes for inputting various information throughout the process. For the sake of a tour, I’ll show you.

Once you’ve created a class you have a platform you essentially can add everything you need for that specific forum- student names, attendance, grades, assignments.. pretty much everything you need for the course.

Inputting student names is pretty easy.

Just click add, enter the names and you’ve entered your class roster.

Then you can move on to adding assignments to grade.

Once you’ve entered the assignment, you can grade it. One thing I really liked was that you enter how many points a person received, and the site converted it to a percentage. Since there are some that are mathematically challenged (ahem), this is a nice feature. Though, that math isn’t THAT hard.

The last thing I really took a look at is the attendance sheet- and since I had my class starting in October, I couldn’t really test this feature. But here’s what it looks like:

All in, I think this is an interesting site- but probably more useful to secondary educators than to those at the university level. Once platforms like Blackboard become more ubiquitous, sites like this will offer a more cost-effective approach to record keeping. Though if I were to institute this on school-wide level I would want a little more information regarding security.

So, good tool, maybe not for librarians. Check it out, it’s a neat site.